Penn Media to Convert 50 E-Zines to Blogs: 7 million subscribers targeted
Penn Media announced today that it will publish fifty of its flagship owned and operated e-zines as Blogs, making them one of the largest publishers of consumer trade blogs in the blogosphere.
Pheedo Incis providing the consulting services for the rollout and the providision RSS and Weblog advertising services.
The blogs are scheduled to roll out over the next three months. Penn Media President, Jaffer Ali stated, “We have been Blogging before it had a name. Essentially the nature of building relationships through content, and having people subscribe to content via email was the first kind of Blogging experience. But now with Blogging tools, we are combining the ‘push’ aspect of e-zines with the web-centric approach of Blogs and the ‘pull’ nature of RSS.”
Penn Media plans to continue publishing the e-zines and run them concurrently, but allow readers to communicate with each other through the Blog. This is to help foster a community surrounding the subscriber base. It will drive traffic to the blogs via their newsletters that are delivered to over 7 million monthly subscribers.
Pheedo’s Chief Marketing Officer, Bill Flitter commented, “Blogs represent an evolution of content delivery from e-zines. Migrating e-zine content to the Blogosphere is a way to introduce content to a new audience while fostering a sense of community. We are witnessing a significant shift in media consumption habits and we are pleased to be working with Penn to guide them through this progression.”
Penn Media and Pheedo believe that combining Blogs, RSS feeds and e-zines pushed to subscribers is a new multi-publishing technique that creates unique advertising opportunities across all properties. Ali continued, “The number of advertising opportunities within each blog is rather endless. We anticipate millions of new ad impressions created by our 7 million subscribers. We will be incorporating streamed video commercials inside the Blog, contextual ads based upon the content, subscription opportunities for other e-zines and Blogs, RSS feeds and much more. This is evolving faster than we had anticipated. Pheedo has been instrumental in coordinating our efforts into the blogosphere.”